CARING FOR ‘STRANGERS’? HOW (NOT)?

Mini-symposium on care and allyship – 20 October 2025

Part of the SLARG research week 2025 – Sint Lucas Antwerp
Link to the full program: https://slarg.be/research-week/2025

Dimitri van den Wittenboer, PhD researcher (SLARG/ARIA), hosts a symposium exploring citizen-organised support structures for undocumented people and refugees in Brussels. The event focuses on individuals and collectives who extend care beyond their families and intimate circles to “strangers”—people they may never have met, arriving from different countries, cultures, and religions, often living under heightened precarity. At stake are fundamental questions of hospitality, solidarity, and care.

Invited guests will share their experiences, alongside moderated prompts and reflections. Together, we will explore questions such as:

• What forms of citizen-led mutual aid exist in Brussels?
• What motivates people to offer support?
• What challenges and ethical dilemmas arise in this work?
• How might we live—together—in an unfair world?
• How can we move beyond charity toward mutuality, allyship, and shared struggle?

The session is designed as a communal discussion, connecting experiences, practices, and reflections. It is open to anyone interested in mutual aid, care ethics, and collective solidarity.

Dimitri’s doctoral project, Empowered Care, investigates housing initiatives co-created with people facing acute legal and financial insecurity. His practice examines how care can be embedded in daily life through shared living spaces, and how ethics, vulnerability, and solidarity are negotiated in such settings. Community practice, as Dimitri frames it, is a space where activism, social work, and art intersect. Ethical questions are central, particularly in a context of growing global inequality, forced migration, and state violence.

• Date: 20 October 2025, 17:00 –19:00
• Location: Sint Lucas Antwerpen, AdMa Room, K.03.09
• Free entrance